Megite, and the ZZ List Blogger
A couple of days ago traffic for Cloudy Thinking went up by a factor of 5X. I couldn’t figure out why my article on Amazon’s S3 service (and why that means fast upstream network connections will become A Big Deal) generated so much attention.
Today I finally figured out the traffic spike. Megite.com had included a reference to the article.
Thank you, Mathew Chen, Mr. Megite. Wow, it makes a big impact.
I have never appeared on Gabe Rivera’s tech.memeorandum. I am small potatoes, and with a Technorati rank of about 80,000, I don’t make the cut in his (clever!) algorithm.
One day tech.memorandum ran a post from a Genuine A-List dude as a headline. The first link inside that post was to Cloudy Thinking. As best I can tell, my little article was the catalyst for the article that landed as a top-level headline on tech.memeorandum. But there was no way the algorithm could deduce the connection.
When I was a kid, my devout Christian parents (may they rest in peace) taught me that you go to heaven on how we act and live overall. Yeah, you’ll make some mistakes (“sins”) but if you correct your mistakes and try to do the right thing, you still have a shot at Heaven.
[Note: I am pretty sure I am headed the other direction, but that's a different story.]
The same idea holds (I think) in blog-o-land. In the long run, if you add value and post interesting stuff, and don’t screw up a lot, you will eventually draw a crowd.
It may be a SMALL crowd. That’s OK. You’ll find a few people who think about the same things you do, people who are excited (or repulsed) by similar things.
Your group of readers may number in the tens or hundreds. You may be a niche inside a niche inside a tiny segment of humanity.
It’s OK. You communicate with a few people. You enrich their experience now and then, and they in turn share ideas with you, and correct your mistakes.
Being a ZZ List Blogger is not a bad deal.
Thank you for reading this!